My American Journey.

Mr. Bacevich is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.

AS THIS review appears, the return of Colin Powell to public life has taken on the trappings of a triumphal procession. In treatment accorded more typically to rock stars than to literary neophytes, the retired general has inspired something approaching a personality cult -- complete with coast-to-coast tour, fawning media coverage, and groupies who at every stop crowd sidewalks in the hope of obtaining an autograph or perhaps merely in order to bask in his reflected glory. My American Journey, the ostensible basis for the hoopla, has rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists. In a society in which sitting through any movie more than two hours long is seen as a mark of serious commitment, one may wonder whether the legions lining up to buy the general's memoir will actually read its six-hundred-plus pages. Rather, one senses that it is being acquired as a talisman, testifying to the purchaser's deep regard for a Great American. Yet if My American Journey is merely collected rather than read, that will be a misfortune. This is in its way an important book --though its true significance seems likely to be overlooked.

To the extent that the text itself has received scrutiny, attention has focused on its closing pages, in which Powell lifts the veil ever so slightly on his political beliefs and ambitions. Whether intended as the foundation for a run for the Presidency, or merely as a marketing device, this section has been subjected to detailed exegesis by those eager to divine whether the former general is a genuine conservative or a closet liberal, an authentic Republican or a Democrat in disguise.

The emphasis is misplaced. Powell's opaque and cliche-ridden political testament is easily the weakest part of his book, the one section that comes across as ersatz, as if drafted by some committee of excessively coy political operatives rather than by Powell himself and his collaborator. The contrast with the easy, anecdotal tone and brisk pace of the rest of the narrative could hardly be more striking.

What does that narrative have to offer? Although unlikely to displace Ulysses S. Grant's military memoirs among the classics of the genre, My American Journey is a charming story well told. No doubt many will find it inspirational. Yet few readers are likely to mistake it for great literature. Those searching for penetrating insight or introspection will likewise find it disappointing. Indeed, the book provides little evidence to suggest that Powell is blessed with a powerful intellect or a capacity for innovative thought.

Rather, he is a man of his times: better at fashioning sound-bites than at acting the part of visionary. Professing to have been "astonished by the death grip of old ideas on some military minds," Powell appears oblivious to the stolidly conventional nature of his own thinking. His chief claim to boldness as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rests on his sponsorship of a scheme for modestly shrinking the Cold War military while preserving it from anything resembling fundamental restructuring -- the so-called Base Force concept which was dead-on-arrival in Congress. Thus, although Powell's status as the most renowned officer of his generation will no doubt remain intact, his legacy turns out to be thin on substance.

Rising to the top of the American military hierarchy in a period brimming with momentous developments, Powell was no more Great Captain than he was Great Reformer. Instead, to judge from these pages, he was the consummate political general: skillful inside operator, master of the bureaucracy, cool and telegenic briefer, careful cultivator of the influential within government and the media. It is an image with which Powell himself is not especially comfortable. Time and again, he insists that his true calling was to the brotherhood of warriors. Although he labors to bolster that claim -- ticking off with almost unseemly thoroughness every soldierly accomplishment, from his days in ROTC summer camp ("Best Cadet, Company D") through a career in which he graduated at or near the top of his class in each military school or training course he attended and in which he routinely received accelerated promotions -- his case is not persuasive. In fact, from the time that, as a young major, he donned civvies to enter graduate school in 1969 until he retired in 1993, his assignments with the Army in the field were brief and sporadic. He was a touch-and-go soldier, swooping in to fill some plum career-enhancing billet, only to be summoned in short order to return to Washington to deal with weightier matters of state.

That pattern of assignments reflected not happenstance but shrewdness. The ethos of the profession in which Colin Powell flourished is as much one of cut-throat competition as it is of selfless service. Success requires that an officer master the rules of the game at an early age and then play that game with single- minded intensity. Powell was a quick study. Even as a very junior officer, he proved himself to be a skillful player, resolute in his refusal to be distracted by any extraneous cause or controversy. Thus, in recalling his encounters with flagrant racism while serving in the Deep South, Powell justifies his decision to swallow his resentment. "I wanted, above all, to succeed in my Army career. I did not intend to give way to self-destructive rage, no matter how provoked. If people in the South insisted on living by crazy rules, then I would play the hand dealt me for now." The rules were crazy but he would abide by them. He would not rock the boat. "I was not looking for trouble. I was not marching, demonstrating, or taking part in sit-ins. My eye was on an Army career for myself and a good life for my family. For me, the real world began on the post."

Nor would Powell rock the boat in Vietnam, although he denounces here the "conspiracy of illusion" foisted on the military by arrogant and uncaring civilian leaders. Powell served two tours in Southeast Asia, first as an advisor with ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), subsequently with a U.S. unit. He claims to have known from the outset that the entire enterprise was bankrupt, and he derides the search for an operational formula to break the stalemate as not only futile but fatuous: "the secure-hamlet nonsense, the search-and-sweep nonsense, the body-count nonsense, all of which we knew was nonsense, even as we did it."

More craziness, but Powell continued to play the game. By the time he returned to Vietnam as a staff officer with the Americal Division -- after the Tet Offensive and after My Lai -- nonsense had been supplanted by widespread rot and corruption. The rules now included "euphemisms, lies, and self-deception" that were eating at the very foundation of American military professionalism. "Readiness and training reports in the Vietnam era," Powell records, "were routinely inflated to please and conceal rather than to evaluate and correct." As a division G-3, the officer responsible for compiling and collating those reports, he was in a position to know. But still Powell played the game, collecting his medals and impeccable efficiency reports. Then he went home. "A corrosive careerism had infected the Army," he admits, "and I was part of it."

Yet to leave the war zone was not to escape the war. Powell returned from Vietnam deeply affected by the experience. Anger and bitterness over the war coalesced into certain "lessons" that would henceforth inform his understanding of war and politics: the imperative of exquisitely well-defined objectives as a prerequisite for any military commitment; the importance of employing "massive force" to preclude future quagmires; the belief that civilian meddling in military matters invites disaster; the ever-present worry that under pressure the military's political masters would buckle, with soldiers left to pay the price.

The perceptions and prejudices that Powell took from Vietnam were by no means atypical among officers of his generation. Quite the opposite. Indeed, to the extent that My American Journey is of any lasting value it is precisely on this point: not as the up-from- the-Bronx tale of a fabulously popular general who may or may not make a run for the White House, but as a document that describes how the experience of Vietnam profoundly altered the relationship between the American military and American society. In this sense, Vietnam is the axis around which Powell's memoir turns, not simply an unpleasant way station in the path of a brilliant career, but its overarching motif, dark, disturbing, and even today unresolved.

The ignominious failure of Vietnam produced what Powell calls "the long estrangement between the American people and their defenders." Who bears the responsibility for that failure and that estrangement? Powell's view is clear: the fault rests with Them, not Us. The category of Them is a broad one, encompassing not only the architects of the war but their successors with whom Powell would deal as a senior officer, the amateurish and cavalier officials quick to treat GIs like "toy soldiers to be moved around on some global game board." It includes the Congress, which Powell castigates for its "shameful unwillingness to abandon the pork barrel and make the hard decisions the people elect it to make." And it includes the American people, implicitly condemned for failing to keep faith with those they sent to fight in Indochina. "As a career officer," Powell writes, "I was willing to do my duty. But as far as the rest of the country was concerned, we were doing it alone."

The sense of abandonment and betrayal implicit in those words marks the true beginning of the "journey" recounted in these pages. That journey is not personal but institutional. It is not the ascendancy of an ambitious young black soldier, but the recovery of a military establishment that gradually went from being viewed in the 1970s as a canker on American society to being hailed in the 1990s as the sole remaining healthy organ in a body politic otherwise afflicted with a raging distemper. In short, the essential theme of this book is not individual achievement but collective redemption.

Thus, Powell's vast satisfaction with U.S. victories in Panama and the Persian Gulf stems less from what these successes did to advance vital national interests than from how they helped end the military's Vietnam-induced alienation from society. Recalling how he had watched Operation Desert Storm unfold on TV (itself a telling revelation), Powell records his delight at seeing the GIs who had been vilified in Vietnam now celebrated as heroes. "I sat there, melting. This was the military I wanted the country to see, not the old stereotype dropout from nowheresville, but smart, motivated, patriotic Americans, the best and brightest." Were the festivities that followed the Gulf War victory a bit excessive? Probably, admits Powell. But in his view, "if we got too much adulation for this one, it made up for the neglect the troops had experienced coming home from those other wars."

Of course, no one has benefited more from that excess than Powell himself. In the popular mind, he personified the glistening image of competence, dedication, and high moral character now adhering to the military. As a result, for America's highest-ranking military officer, popular adulation of soldiers has translated directly into a multimillion-dollar book contract and made him a presidential contender even though the electorate has only the barest inkling of his political views.

Yet as the frenzy of the present-day Powell phenomenon itself suggests, if victory in the Gulf and elsewhere ended the military's estrangement, it has by no means produced a stable civil - military equilibrium. Instead, it has induced another wild fluctuation in society's attitude toward the military, with the new attitude no less distorted and artificial than the one that grew out of the Vietnam experience. That officers like Powell who were shaped by that experience are willing to indulge America's sudden infatuation with the military may be understandable. But in the long run this infatuation -- based in part on illusion and exaggerated expectations -- is not good for the American military. Nor is it good for American society as a whole.

According to Powell, the Army to which he devoted his adult life "was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America" --a proposition that has been received uncritically and even endorsed by many in politics and the media. Yet that statement -- implying that military institutions have much to teach the nation about democracy's true meaning -- is profoundly misleading. Indeed, it reveals an elementary confusion about the distinction between military and civil values.

In fact, the ideals of the military are anything but democratic. Americans should not have it otherwise. For the military to fulfill its tasks as an instrument of state power requires that soldiers effectively nurture their military ideals -- courage, discipline, honor, sacrifice, self-denial -- which are the very antitheses of the radical individualism dominating American culture on the eve of the Third Millennium. Should the military succeed in remaining faithful to those ideals, this nation will have more than sufficient cause to be grateful. But to suggest that military institutions are in some sense custodians of the nation's political values is an outrageous conceit.

In reinforcing this confusion over the rehabilitated military's role in society, My American Journey provides a potent argument against General Powell's entry into politics.

The allure of a Powell Presidency is that installing a soldier in the White House -- a unifying figure who rises above the muck of partisanship -- will offer a means of sidestepping vexing social and cultural controversies. This is the politics of antipolitics, based on the patronizing notion that the complaints roiling the electorate do not deserve to be taken seriously and that personality or style alone might suffice to quiet the rabble. In his book, Powell himself betrays this attitude. He dismisses the outcome of the 1992 and 1994 elections as indicative of so much channel-surfing by befuddled voters. Using the armed forces as his model, he outlines an alternative theory of politics in which the supreme value would be harmony: "We have to start thinking of America as a family."

Whatever the ultimate destination of the political "revolution" now under way, soggy thinking like Colin Powell's would divert that revolution into the nearest bog. That prospect alone should give conservatives pause about lending support to a Powell candidacy. But there is a second and more fundamental reason why conservatives and liberals alike should view such a candidacy with skepticism: Powell's delusion that the attributes of military leadership offer a proper response to deep-seated political discontents, a delusion that suggests a badly muddled understanding of the theory and practice of democratic politics. The purpose of politics is not to anoint as leader someone who will soothe our discontents and "bring us together," but to provide an arena for fighting out the issues signified by those discontents, thereby determining the shape of American society.

Perhaps Powell himself will sense the danger imbedded in that muddle, the danger of disregarding a principle first articulated by the Founding Fathers but no less true today: that maintaining a clear distinction between the military realm and the civilian realm is essential to the well-being of this Republic. Encrusted with honors, his high standing with the people guaranteed by one last turn in the spotlight, Colin Powell would thus render his final act of service to his country and his profession by adhering to the soldier's code to which he has long aspired and quietly fading away.